Looking for values

The new generations of Indians in public life do not seem to believe in the value of moral principles, which the leaders of the freedom movement swore by.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who's the fairest of us all?

Sometimes it is not a bad thing to look into the mirror because we often forget what we are or what we have become. This is a time, more than any other, when we need to look very carefully into the mirror. What we see there may not be very nice.

We may see, for instance, that we have accepted corruption and vice, theft and bribery as attributes that have little to do with the popularity a political personality may have. We have only to look at the recent elections to the State Assembly in Uttar Pradesh and, even more recently, at the byelections in Andhra Pradesh.

In the first instance, the Samajwadi Party (S.P.), a party that was known for having among its leaders persons facing criminal charges, was brought back to power by a very large margin. True, the party was given a new face by its chief, Mulayam Singh Yadav, in the shape of his son Akhilesh Yadav, who has a clean record and was widely known to have blocked the entry to the party of persons with criminal records; in fact Akhilesh Yadav was then anointed the Chief Minister of the State. But did the people vote for the S.P. candidates because they were convinced that this party had reformed itself and was now a model of a clean and honest political party, or was it because they were disillusioned by Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief, Mayawati, and the other contenders from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress?

And similarly, we have seen, recently in Andhra Pradesh, Jaganmohan Reddy's YSR Congress win 15 of the 18 Assembly byelections. The point is that Jaganmohan Reddy is known to have begun whatever business he had some years ago, before his father Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy became Chief Minister, with assets he himself had declared to be some Rs.10 or 15 lakh, if memory serves one right, and now he has declared his assets to be in excess of Rs.300 crore. No one has questioned the sudden increase in his wealth; it has nothing to do, it would appear, with his popularity.

There are similar instances all over the country. The gods have smiled on the Badal family in Punjab, and their wealth has increased by very large amounts; in Karnataka, where the Lok Ayukta has found former Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa guilty of corrupt practices, and where he had to step down as Chief Minister, and even go to jail, he still has a large following among the Members of the Legislative Assembly and, by implication, among the people; and in Tamil Nadu A. Raja, who had to relinquish the post of Union Minister of Telecommunications, and who then spent over a year in jail, came out on bail to a hero's welcome in Chennai.

So where does all this leave us? What do we find in the mirror? Is it a reflection of a people, fragmented and divided though they may be, united in the assumption that allegations of stealing public money, even killing people, are of no consequence? None of these people has done even a fraction of what Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has done for the people of Bihar.

Somewhere, in the years since we were led to freedom by people who believed in the value of moral principles in public life, we have lost sight of those ideals. The generations that came after found easy money too tempting to pass by, and they passed on their beliefs not just to others in their parties but to their families. Sons and daughters were given the best education possible in the United States, Britain and in other centres of learning and academic excellence elsewhere, and are now doubtless doing well, bringing up their children in the best schools and colleges.

This may be seen as outrageous by many of us in the middle classes; but to the people, the poor and those barely able to make ends meet, it does not seem to matter. When the social activist Anna Hazare stages a fast, the crowds that go there are middle-class people protesting against corruption; do the poor go there? No. They go to the rallies called by leaders who are perceived to be corrupt and criminal. The polarisation is too obvious to miss. Principles and power. The middle class and the poor.

These are what the mirror will show us one cannot resist quoting Shakespeare on how actors hold a mirror up to nature, a mirror that shows virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. The age and body of the time our time, any time will be seen for what it is in the mirror held up to nature, to ourselves. It is time we recognised this, and moved beyond outrage and indignation. Somewhere there must be people who may not be the tall leaders of old but who can at least carry forward their ideals and principles there are some one has heard of, whose work is known and respected but there needs to be many such. Not the activists, of whom one has become quite weary, but those who do things, however small, to build their little milieu into a better place.

Only a multitude of such people can make a difference, chiefly in creating an awareness of the horrifying consequences of condoning and even celebrating the evil of bribery and thuggery when it is coupled with power, and how it can be resisted, as one frail old man showed an earlier generation. He resisted the brute force of an alien state on the moral ground that its rule was wrong. Today, the need must be to resist what is wrong perhaps by the same means.

There may be other solutions. But these have to be found soon. We can see how this already fragmented, disorganised country is being shaken by the forces of what one can only call immorality. And since we cannot just wait, eyes fixed on the heavens for a leader to emerge, we have to find small solutions at our own levels.